Technological wonder

I wonder whether this will work, this technology advancement that writing from my Iphone might confer upon my life. Or will it just be a pain because the phone cant cope with me switching languages all the time...


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Thoughts on language and teaching

Oh what a long time since my last blog entry! Just been a bit too much going on. But I've been thinking about it the whole time, I promise...

So there's this thing that's been preying on my mind for some time. It has to do with language and education, and attitudes to both these things. A couple of years ago I ran a course at Masters level for the Swedish agricultural University, SLU, over a period of 10 weeks. From the students who participated in that course I learnt that all the Masters courses at SLU are run in English, they're open to international students so there's a reason for this. But here's the first problem, which someone actually brought to my attention much earlier. Not all of the university lecturers are proficient enough in English to allow the teaching to be at an appropriate level. The person who first mentioned this to me was very concerned about the standard.

Fast forward to my course and my discussions with the students. This course was also run in English, which wasn't much of a problem for me, it being my native tongue, but it certainly caused complications for the students. A couple of them in particular had quite a hard time because I ran the whole course based on participation and discussion and their lack of practice that English held them back. Now this course happened to be the last one of their entire university education. So they had been to at least two years of courses run in English and you have to wonder why they hadn't already become quite used to using the language. The simple answer, I learnt, was that no one had forced them to participate in discussions previously.

We talked about this at length and, after experiencing what the 10 weeks with me had given them in terms of knowledge as well as practice, they were themselves painfully aware of the shortcomings of having to sit and listen without active participation in all the previous courses (lectures).

So I have two points here: the first is that language is a fairly important part of the art and skill of teaching, how on earth do you get complex subjects across without control of language? My second point is, what on earth is going on when Masters level education does not include an absolute requirement for student participation?

And just as a final point, one might care to dwell on the fact that while Swedes are in general much better at English than other nationalities that don't speak it as their first language, that doesn't necessarily mean that people are really good at English. Better is a relative term. There are very few people that speak English well enough to be able to teach a university level course.

A statistics-on-social-media update

Are you really aware of how big this is? (watch directly on YouTube if the window doesn't size properly)

PowerPoint gone mad

Here's a wonderful example of the terror of PowerPoint. Of course it's not Ppt one should look to for the cause of this. We're hard on Ppt and it takes the brunt of the criticism because it's an easy target. But Ppt doesn't invent this type of content on its own, does it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?emc=eta1

Ppt is used all too often as a  manuscript for the speaker so try to focus on not showing the audience your manuscript - build a content for the AUDIENCE instead.

Absorb those great words

The next time you hold a presentation try checking out this site first.

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/04/50-incredible-historical-speeches/

It's a collection of some of the best-known and impressive speeches, in English and with a strong American bias! I have a theory that listening to the voices of his great speakers can have a positive effect on your own intonation and maybe even on your self-confidence. Just don't let yourself get phased out by the gap between us normal people and them.

Keep it simple s....d

Well I've been going on about this for some time now so I hope no one thinks this is news ;) but here's a link to a very interesting scientific article which demonstrates once again that you should keep it simple.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051031075447.htm

The title of the article is wonderful: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”

I guess you get the message.

A couple of quotes: "Anything that makes a text hard to read and understand, such as unnecessarily long words or complicated fonts, will lower readers' evaluations of the text and its author."

"One thing seems certain: write as simply and plainly as possible and it's more likely you'll be thought of as intelligent."

Did you know that Word has a built in readability check?

Amazing what you find out just by chance.

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Spelling & Grammar tab.
2. Select the Check grammar with spelling check box.
3. Select the Show readability statistics check box, and then click OK.
4. On the Standard toolbar, click Spelling and Grammar .
   
   When Microsoft Word finishes checking spelling and grammar, it displays information about the reading level of the document.

Charisma Wordle

I tested a new idea last week. I was sitting eating lunch in the middle of a one-day course for a group of 78 students and it suddenly occurred to me that I finally had the opportunity to test something that will only work really well with a large group of people. The perfect opportunity! I divide the students up into 13 groups and gave each group the instructions to define a charismatic speaker using five keywords.I opened the website Wordle.net and (painfully) typed in all the words they gave me. That's quite a lot of words. Then I just clicked the button, chose a layout and colours and hey presto! He is the result. The size of the words reflects their frequency and the website algorithm automatically arranges them. Apart from the odd spelling mistake which messes up the frequency of course, you can see which words were the commonest and you get an instant impression of the results. Great fun, great site!

Link: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1929130/100421_självständigt_arbete

More tools

Here's a bunch of computer-based tools that might be useful if you work with page mockups or graphic design or designing webpages.

http://www.badlanguage.net/seven-website-mockup-tools

Sorry about the missing side

My blog seems to consistently remove the right-hand side of any video window that I put up. In other words the column width in my  browser is narrower than the video window.   I might manage to fix it one day but in the meantime I suggest that you just go to YouTube or Ted and view the video in situ there. Sorry about this!

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

This is a very interesting story, quite a long presentation but it holds a fascinating message about how our brains learn to see. As with many of the videos on TED.com a great learning experience.

And here's another video of the same product

You may not be able to see the whole width here so just go to YouTube and look up project Natal.

One more, the famous project Natal.

Here's another one

Latest technology trends

Just been cruising around on the Internet checking out some nice examples of Augmented Reality. I found this little video of a product that actually exists and which was quite fun.

Great presentation, but your mouth's not for breathing!

A good example of what mouth-breathing does to your presentation:



It makes you sound hurried, breathless (because you probably are) and stressed. Try to breath through your nose and at the same time it will make you slow down (hard to speak at the same time!), you won't dry out your mouth and throat as much and you won't make those sounds that the microphone picks up so easily....

Trust me!

My interest in social media as a tool and a phenomenon has recently led me in the direction of thinking a lot about the issue of trust. If you want to inform people, to spread the word, to educate or enlighten then there are several efficient methods for doing this using the Internet. There are many ways to draw traffic to your site and channels through which you can push out e-mails, for example. Spreading information requires of course thought and work but it's not that difficult. It becomes a totally different issue when you want people to act on that information. Whatever it is you want them to do: to help you spread the information further, to change their behaviour, to buy something, to support something and so on. This is when you also need trust and credibility.

So, simply put, whenever you're selling in the broader sense of the word then you need to invest in building relationships with other people that involve some degree of trust. Of course that's not to say that you don't need trust or credibility to spread information. Without some possibility of judging its source the information can become quite worthless. But there's a big step involved in getting people to act.

So if you take the example of standing in front of an audience holding a presentation and you need to make the transition from being a credible source of information to a trustworthy influencer of people's behaviour, how do do this? Well, I have a lot to say about this! Not really enough room here, but here's one simple thing.

Take a look at this video on TED.com: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

Watch it without the sound for a while. This is a person who has a tremendously powerful message. Credibility at a high level and impressive in many ways. I think this comes across even without hearing the words. And I think one of the reasons has to do with his posture. This is a good example of what is sometimes called the Professor's Stance. Leaning slightly forward, hands clasped in front of the chest, shoulders slightly forward and maybe a bit raised. Head also forward, gaze predominantly downwards. You can contrast this with the so-called Heart Stance where the solar plexus is projected forward, head slightly back, chin up, eyes looking mostly upwards and accompanied by a wide and open gestures with the hands. 

The professor's stance gives an impression of a learned person, of introversion, of attention to detail and all the things we associate with an intellectual. But it shuts out other people. It gives us an impression of a closed world to which we're not admitted and unfortunately is often accompanied by a language that does the same thing, full of specialised terms, details and complications.

The heart stance is a collection of gestures that signals "you can trust me, I have nothing to hide, and I trust you not to attack me!" the throat is exposed, the gaze is open and direct, palms of the hands are visible and more importantly the sensitive area on the inside of the wrists.

This is all extremely powerful stuff. It sends signals that go directly to our unconscious primitive selves and it's quite hard to ignore the gut feeling that we get. So despite the fact that this person is talking great sense and there are many things in the message that convince us intellectually,  I'm not sure that he would succeed in actually getting people to act. In other words really SELLING the ideas. And in just one word: trust. We are, after all, mostly unmoved by logic or purpose or intention, unfortunately. If we were, not many people would smoke... Gut feelings, a relationship with the person who's influencing us and motivation that comes from our emotions are just some of the things that are needed to get people to spring into action. 

So body language is just one small thing, in a situation where you're giving a talk. As I said, there's a WHOLE lot more.

The dark side of presentation technique

I just read an entry in Nick Morgan's blog see: http://bit.ly/cgyocY
The top 10 list of speakers audience abuse! Yes, we've all seen these. Nice list. I was thinking about some of this stuff a few weeks ago when I listened to lots of talks over a period of some days. There was one speaker that was excellent in many respects. He had great charisma, an important message, backed up by a lot of experience and credibility. His body language was relaxed and friendly and everything seem great. But I found myself drifting off time and time again and I missed big chunks of what he was saying. So pretty soon I started wondering why. After some thought I realised that it could only really be one thing: he was speaking really fast. Since then I've heard a couple more people do exactly the same thing, they are also good speakers with authority and presence. For me at least, this is quite a barrier to getting through. It signals lack of preparation. It gives the impression that they are going to run over time even when they've just started and you get appropriately nervous over this. Not many people can talk fast without exuding stress with every syllable they pronounce. Even if everything else is good I start to feel exhausted after a while and need a break from listening. It also stops you from really digesting what is said. When we hear other people's words all of us have our own unique set of associations, pictures and follow-up thoughts in our heads. We're neither on the same straight track as the speaker, nor always capable of keeping up with the pace they set and many of our own sidetracks are more important to us than the speaker's train of thought. So speaking very fast is way, way off. On the contrary, you need to speak far slower than you normally would. Let people get used to your accent and voice and give them time to follow their sidetracks and come back to you again.

I could make a list of things that indicate to me that the speaker is there for their own good and not the audience's. One of these would certainly be speaking very fast. Then of course there's a bunch of things that are on Nick's list. Like not even looking at the audience for instance. Then there are a few things that are just plain annoying and distracting. Like waving the laser pointer around wildly and drawing circles and arrows in the air that only you can see inside your head! Or pacing and hopping back and forth repeatedly. Movement is tremendously distracting but you can take advantage of that and use it in a constructive way. Lots of ideas about this! But now I'll quit whining and try to come up with some constructive thoughts :)

Come and meet me at Handelskammaren Stockholm!

I will be taking part as an exhibitor in the Handelskammaren Expo next week. Why not come by and say hello? Entry is free, as well as the cakes... Here are the details:

Välkommen till Handelskammarhuset

vid Kungsträdgården där vi arrangerar

företagsmässan HandelskammarExpo den 20

april. Du får nya affärskontakter och möjlighet

att utöka ditt professionella nätverk genom

personliga möten och tillfälle till samtal.

På HandelskammarExpo
möter du

utställande företag från en mängd olika

branscher, samtidigt som du kan marknadsföra

ditt företag. Vi tror att personliga relationer är

vägen till framgång och att skapa en kontakt är

första steget.

Se en presentation av utställarna på vår

hemsida www.chamber.se/expo

Alla intresserade är välkomna -

även företag och personer som inte är

medlemmar i Handelskammaren.

Inträdet är gratis och vi bjuder på kaffe

och tårtbuffé!

När: tisdagen 20 april kl 13-16

Var: Handelskammarhuset,

Västra Trädgårdsgatan 9

Anmäl dig gärna i förväg till:

info@chamber.se

ange namn och företag

Keep it short, again

Back again after a short absence! I had way too much to do the last few days and a whole bunch of important presentations and courses coming up. Thought I'd better follow my own advice and prepare properly...

It's strange how things seem to bunch together into trends, the last week or so it's all been about keeping things short. It seemed to start just after I put up that last post, weird that. So I've been thinking about ways to cut down your talk, maybe just because it's too long, or maybe because you're facing the serious challenge of saying a lot of stuff in five minutes or even less. One way you could try is to first write down everything you want to say (you don't need to write every single word, just enough so that you can remember what the full sentences would be). Aim for approximately the right length of time but it doesn't matter if you're a fair bit over. Then talk your way through all your material and just see how long it takes. Now you know how big the problem is. Maybe there are some things that you can take away already, and having experienced how much excess material you have, the resulting adrenaline level may help you here. Chop as much as you can. Now talk through it all again. Still panicking? Take off some more. When you're getting closer to the right length of time then you can start taking away smaller pieces. Details, complicated ways of saying things, lists with more than three items,etc. Can you think of any similes are metaphors that will save even more time? Do you have any pictures you could use?

So now you're hopefully fairly close but either way, here's something to think about if you want to both shorten your talk and get across your message. For each sentence or statement pick out the really important keywords. There are not usually so many. Use a highlighter pen to mark them.When you speak, these are the words that you need to put the emphasis on and if you put plenty of emphasis on these then you can also take it away from some of the small words between them. Try to figure out the absolute minimum number of words that you need people to hear in order for the message to get across. This serves two purposes, making sure the key message sticks as well as saving precious seconds on the things that you don't actually need to say, people will understand anyway. Of course this also makes your voice easier to listen to when you vary the emphasis on different words. You can see this as the same process as reducing text on a slide down to 3 bullet points with maybe only two or three words for each. There are really an awful lot of things that you don't need to either write or say in order to get the message across, and doing an exercise like this you may be surprised at how few words actually carry the core of your message. 

Of course this is just one way to work and one way to look at the principal of keeping a talk really short. You can never ignore the absolutely key activity of first considering who the audience are and what your main message is (see an earlier post). Does anyone have any other tips about keeping it short?

Thomas Jefferson said:

"When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it." A great quote which goes to the heart of the issue of keeping presentations simple.

The language of music

Easter break is over, that went fast... I spent the first day on the Kraftkällan Easter special four-hour Spinning session at the gym, a good example of how far will power will get you. The second half of the day was spent getting over it. The next day was sunny and I was out in the garden all day raking oak leaves, clearing borders, putting out the garden furniture (just asking for bad weather). Next day in Stockholm with a visit to the International Dog show, and yesterday indoors watching the snow fall most of the day, I knew that garden furniture was a bad idea. I got out eventually to massacre two enormous clematis plants but that didn't take long. So I hope you had a good easter, with lots of chocolate eggs and a break from work. I thought I'd kick off this short week with a wonderful video from TED.com that goes to the heart of what music means to us.

The power of the metaphor

So much that can be said about using metaphors to reach people with your communication. Here's a wonderful talk to introduce the subject, and gives you a sense of how you can influence people with the words you choose. Just the beginning!

Shaking in your boots?

I wish I didn't have to do this, I really do, but I sometimes spend a significant part of the time available for courses in talking about ways to control nerves. There are lots and lots of methods, which I might go into later. But right now I'm a bit preoccupied with the cause. If the principle behind being nervous has to do with being "on show" and being judged, then we shouldn't really get over our nerves with more and more practice, but we do don't we, usually. I mean I'm just as much judged tomorrow as 15 years ago; because the audience is not the same, the subject is not the same. I'm the only one who's been part of the phenomenon for 15 years, for them it's maybe the first time they listen to me speak. They're judging away at maximum levels.

We clearly do get more comfortable with the situation after a time and after practice. We get used to it quite simply.  If we can do this on the longer term, why isn't it easier in the shorter term? [It is of course, but no-one can be bothered to practice enough.] Is it really better to wait 10 years to be more comfortable than to spend a few days practicing NOW?

Just wondering...

Storytelling part 1

Tom Waits on Letterman. Just a taster of a great storyteller. He doesn't need many words, and no-one could ever copy this style. There's lots more (inteviews with Letterman) and loads of his music on YouTube.

Why not join me out here in the Webosphere?

I've had a week of total saturation in social media this week. Sometimes it gets like that, I don't know where it all came from really, but everyone was talking about it. Then of course, I did go to a seminar that was really interesting and there was another one today that I didn't go to but heard about. But I was also at a networking meeting in Stockholm where the subject didn't really need to come up, but it did, again and again.

But one thing that strikes me - everyone may be talking about it but VERY few of them are doing it. It's a shame because I don't think I have ever had such an intensive period in my life of learning new things, of insights into the way society is changing and understanding of motivation and social forces as I have since I started seriously exploring my way out into the social web. I was also one of those that said that I didn't have time, for a long time. I've been on LinkedIn since 2004, but no-one else was, so that didn't cost much time. Facebook I reserve only for family. Likewise most of my FlickR photos. But then Twitter came along and eventually I had a spare moment....That's a while ago now and my first attempt got aborted quite fast because it lacked purpose or strategy. But I have a seriously kinesthetic learning style, I can't take much in if I don't do it myself. I have to push all the buttons and try it out to see what it can be used for. I mean, just because it says "what's happening?" by the text box, doesn't mean you HAVE to write about what's happening...  does it...?

I was secretly itching to write a blog for about 4 years, embarrassing to admit that I didn't start earlier than february this year, but you might be interested to know if you haven't started "yet" that it took less than an hour to set it up, fiddle with the layout and write a post to test it. The slow bit is deciding what and why. Oh yes, and another useful factor is a speech recognition software that really works! Dragon Naturally Speaking, highly recommended.

So anyway, there is a vast amount of advice out there in the form of articles and blog posts, more that you will ever have time to read. So if you're curious, what are you waiting for? Press a few buttons, poke a few things, see what happens. And listen. Classic Web 2.0 intro advice:1)  listen, 2) contribute (comment on other people's material), then 3) create.

Sensory overload

Have you ever experienced this: you're giving a presentation at a conference or workshop and you've been sitting in the audience for a while waiting your turn. Your stomach is full of demented butterflies and you're thinking how nice it will be when this is all over.

And then it's your turn! Someone introduces you. You make your way to the front, and suddenly you're standing there, facing back into the room where you were sitting just a short while ago. You're confronted by a sea of faces and you see the room for the first time from this, completely different, angle. There might be some people in the audience that you recognise, you may see someone that you wish wasn't there, maybe a person who is more expert on the subject than you. I think that many people, however, when confronted with a large audience in that kind of situation, don't have such an easy time distinguishing individuals. At that particular moment you're subject to serious sensory overload. Your brain is really busy taking in all the new impressions and sights which are suddenly so unfamiliar from this angle, even if you've been sitting in the room for some hours already. It looks completely different doesn't it?

So is it really surprising that many people say that the first couple of minutes are really the hardest. They have to work very hard to remember what they were going to say and quite often completely forget it. Some people write it all down word by word in order not to be struck by total paralysis. A few minutes later you're into the flow of things and much more relaxed and the start is forgotten.

Why do this to yourself? There's really no need to subject yourself to the enormous sensory input PLUS the extra nervousness and stress at the very beginning of your talk. It's hard enough to focus on saying the right thing and getting off on the right foot. So here's a very simple tip. When most of the people are in their places and the room (or lecture theatre) starts to look much the way it will when you later stand there to give your talk,  take a few moments to stand at the front facing the audience in exactly the position you will take up later. Look around the room, get used to the feeling, and just let your brain absorb all the input, the sights and sounds and the experience of standing there. It couldn't be easier! And it makes a very big difference. When you stand there later everything will be familiar and you will have much more of your cognitive capacity freed up to actually concentrate on your talk.The people sitting in the audience will probably not notice you, they're too busy settling in and looking around for people they know.

PowerPoint templates to download

...can be found here: http://bit.ly/aLmokg
Not quite my taste, but you can always adjust them I guess.

Google shows how to demonstrate customer benefit

Incase you've missed it, this Google ad has given rise to masses of parodies. These days that's the ultimate sign of marketing success I guess. Anyway, pretty nice ad I think. Insightful marketing. Simplicity. Spot on.
I've tried several versions now and have the same problem with all of them; the image is the wrong size, at least on my screen: so if you can't see all the text on the right hand side, you'll probably have to go directly to YouTube and run it from there. Hope it works.

A bit more on Pathos

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." Maya Angelou

Why Twitter is great

...because it forces you to be brief. I've run Elevator Pitch training many times and it occurs to me that I could just put up a Twitter window on my laptop instead and say "go ahead, write me what's good about your product."

Do it with feeling!

I'm very fond of introducing the subject of content and planning of presentations by using Ethos, Logos, Pathos as the foundation and doing an inventory of the messages/tools/approaches that each individual can use for their specific subject. It's usually a bit harder though to get suggestions without prompting when it comes to pathos: the lists for ethos and logos are long but the last one is very short.

While we're on that subject...there's this problem that started way back in the 1600s, with Descartes,  the separation of the rational self and the emotional;  the separation of the technical and social sciences, science and the humanities, to put it very briefly. In the world I inhabit many people have a long technical education and have focussed enormously on "logos",  ethos usually involves listing a lot of university credits and a whole CV (not the best way maybe). So the concept of pathos is harder. An easy thing to achieve however, is simply to show your own enthusiasm for the subject, to exude positivity, to smile. Use examples that are recognised by the audience and which stimulate emotions, sympathy, intuitive understanding and so on.

In the US  it's not only OK to express emotions when you communicate, but almost mandatory for credibility. Much the same in the UK. But in Sweden it's not OK, and can easily reduce credibility. I might well get a lot of protests on this, but everything is relative! So I sometimes feel that there's an inbuilt resistance to the concept somewhere. It needs more explaining anyway, than the other two.  There's a well-known and wonderful scene from the film "Any other Sunday" with Al Pacino that I've used a few times as an illustration of several rhetorical techniques actually, but it's a great ice-breaker however you look at it. Take a look at this, and try telling me you don't understand what pathos is :)

Motivation is a strange thing

I like this little story and article about what motivates people: http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/02/a-story-about-motivation.html
I bought the book "Drive" on saturday. I'll probably review it when I'm finished, but no promises!

The distance between us

In workshops and lectures I talk often about where to stand and how to stand, also how and when to move. Nick Morgan describes some of this beautifuly however in the first part of this blog entry, so I'll just hand you over to him. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/three_steps_to_make_your_next.html#comments

The scary truth about memory

Let me tell you a secret

It must be a secret because not many people seem to take account of it. If you ask people one hour after you have given a talk what they remember of it, you will probably be shocked at how little they do remember. The more you say, the less that goes in, unless you work specifically to make things memorable. I've done the following test now a few times and it's very telling: After a group have given a series of presentations, let's say 5 minutes each and 6 presentations, I ask them to quickly tell me what they remember of the first presentation. First they have to remember who gave the first presentation, can take a while sometimes. Then I write up on the whiteboard all the things they remember for one presentation after the other. A pattern emerges very clearly. The commonest thing that sticks is pictures or photos, striking ones, and best of all relevant ones. The second commonest thing is surprising statistics or numbers. The main message, even though it's thought out quite carefully in these cases, quite often gets lost.

A few weeks ago I coached an executive of a company in Stockholm for an important presentation for a whole day. I hope you're reading this, S, 'cos you did a fantastic job with that slide! He made a single slide with a single statistic on it, just white on black, and turned it into a perfect example of the above principle. That's all he needed for the presentation because the number plus the animation that mutated it into new numbers (all on the same slide by the way) was both striking and memorable and it conveyed a message. You could also say that the statistic itself became a picture because it was so simple. One of my favourite examples.

Some other great examples come from the very first Masters course at SLU that I ran. Outstanding pictures and overall presentations - you're still my dream team guys!

Masses of information on PowerPoint

Here are templates to download and I just can't even begin to list everything else:
http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/powerpoint_tip.html

Check out the bottom

I quite often put up tips and links to stuff I've read etc on Twitter, so don't forget to look at the Twitter feed at the bottom of this blog!

Bobby McFerrin hacks your brain with music

From Ted.com. Cool!

http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music.html

A suitcase full of money

Here's a nice little warm-up for all who need to present their business idea to potential investors.

Imagine you have a suitcase containing 1 million Kronor ( 'cos I'm in Sweden). It's all your own money and you can of course do exactly what you want with it. Consider this for a few moments, I'm sure you can come up with a few ideas of what it could be used for.

OK, now imagine you're in a meeting, and you yourself are about to hear a pitch from a company who are looking for you to invest in them. The suitcase is sitting safely under the table at your feet, all your own money remember. So consider what it would take for the person who will shortly come into the room to win you over and convince you to part with your money. What would they have to say, prove or demonstrate, in order for you to feel comfortable with handing over the money? When you've figured that out you can switch perspective! That person is you. And this can be the measure of the challenge you have ahead of you if you want to finance your company, because sometimes it really is the investor's private capital. If they're investing someone else's money then the threshold could be even higher.

So this is why I love this kind of presentation challenge. You really have to get a lot of things right, and you have to first and foremost remember that you're dealing with flesh and blood and human beings. Impressions and credibility are rather important.

You've heard of an Elevator Pitch? I think I'll call this a Suitcase Pitch :)

Great speeches, a good start

I'm sorry but this is really too good to resist. I really don't mean to be nasty or anything...

Chris Brogan

For a great speaker, relaxed, credible, easy to listen to, see: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/connect/
Even more interesting if you're into social media, but the subject of being someone who people listen to is really spot on!
Check out Chris' blog, tweets, he's all over the place! For me he represents the voice of the best way to network and, not least, to use social media. Clearly the person I follow most, and I don't understand how he manages to write so much.

Here's a great link for info and stuff on social media:

http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/ted-talks-social-meida/

Yeah, the spelling mistake is part of the link!

Creativity is not outside the box!

I must admit that I'm still having trouble with this: people keep saying that you should think out of the box if you want to be creative but ever since I heard the following I've been seriously disturbed by that notion:

List as many things as you can think of that are white, write them all down for 1 minute, maybe 2.

Now think of all the white things in a fridge, and write them down.

Which was easier?

You with me????

To be creative, it seems to me that you need a box to think within. It's much harder to just dream up anything. The definition of creativity, or of new ideas, is when you take two (or more) known things and combine them in new ways. Same thing - start with something that's known. So what's this box, that everyone wants to think outside of?

Business Lab again, yippee!

Gearing up for a new series of private coaching for Uppsala Innovation Centre's Business Lab participant companies.  Coached 17 companies so far, 9 more on the way!

This is one of my favourite activities for several reasons:

1. It's entirely personalised and tailored to each company, always the best way to work
2. It keeps me on my toes to find useful and practical content for each company, on the spot as the discussion progresses. There's no preparation time!
3. We talk mostly about a specific presentation occasion that's not too far off in the future so I imagine it's easier to remember and apply a few specific things, before the ideas fade into the past

But what do you guys think, who actually have to do all the work on the presentations? What would you most like to discuss? What is the most useful content I can deliver to you? What did you think of our meeting if it's already passed?

Communication is tricky

Well, I guess this has to do with communication at the highest level, but above all I think it's one of the best ever advertisement videos ever made. Even though it's a bit old now.

Find-of-the-day on the net

Creative ideas are everywhere! Check out http://www.tabbloid.com/

Social Media helpful stuff

Just found what looks like a very interesting site with tips and information on how to use social media: maybe you need this, like me!
Check here: http://bit.ly/c4bO9O

Clay Shirky Rocks!

If you're interested in the effect social media are having on society, in how things happen these days, in what's going on on the web (2,0) and what the future might bring. (I'm completely fascinated by all this). Then check out Clay Shirky; books, talks and everything else. Just Google. Very practical name, that, there can't really be more than one of them... It also struck me a while ago that his talks contain some great surprising statistics for talks. Maybe I'll have to explain that last comment a bit later on.

Övertyga inte Övertala

Convince don't persuade! It sounds much better in Swedish. This must be the absolute shortest way of describing the purpose behind all the courses or training I run.  I think the word "övertala" is quite telling: att tala över for those that understand Swedish.
Even better to focus on the fact that you cannot change people's minds, only the CONTENT of their minds. You can lead them to another idea or decision if you do it skillfully.

ATTENTION: do I have your attention?

Have you seen those heavy eyelids and expressionless faces? Have you despaired on those occasions when someone shuts their eyes and apparently goes to sleep, rather than listen to what you're saying? What would it take to win back people's attention at times like this? The answer is probably: quite  a lot! It's gone a bit too far when you see these signs. So let's not get there in the first place shall we?

What do you think is the average attention span of someone listening to a presentation? The answer probably varies considerably. Here we're really talking generalisations. It depends on a lot of things.

In his book "Flow", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  states from the latest neuroscience at the time (1992)  that we can manage at most 7 bits of information, such as different sounds, visual stimuli or recognisable emotions, and the quickest we can discriminate between one bit of information and the next is about 0,05 of a second. So it should be possible to process about 126 bits of information, as defined above, per second. To understand what a person is saying requires understanding about 40 bits of information per second, he writes.

If you're interested in more information, check out TED.com using key words around neuroscience and communication. Check out some of the books I recommend here. Google on "attention span" and you'll find all sorts of stuff, and probably be none the wiser! There are bits and pieces of interesting information everywhere.

So just imagine that you are standing holding a presentation in front of a slide packed with words and figures and maybe pictures too. Not a nice image, eh? Most people, in fact, overload the audience most of the time. Just because it's familiar to you doesn't mean you can race through everything approximately as fast as you can say it all. You leave the audience behind really quickly.

Another way to understand the phenomenon is to think about how long you yourself can hold your focus in different situations. For the purposes of presentations I've heard several times that 2-3 minutes is about the best you can hope for. However you look at it, you have to work at keeping people's attention. The key word is VARIATION.

Vary everything. Go from pictures to text, vary the tone (and all other aspects) of your voice and how you stand, as well as where you stand. For each new section or slide move to a new position to clearly mark the shift. Put in exercises, ask questions, do live demos etc etc. Your imagination is all that's stopping you.

Obama again

President Obama's speeches are a wonderful contemporary source of material for analysing rhetoric. I've done the Chicago victory speech to death in a number of courses, almost repeating it in my sleep now. So here is an interesting comment on Obama's latest rhetorical offering from my hero Nick Morgan: http://bit.ly/d7ixiP

Myths and Misconceptions

Well there are lots of these, but let's just take one of the commonest. You may have heard some numbers referring to the percentage of our communication that is contributed by body language (usually said to be around 70%), voice (about 6-7%) and the actual words (about 6%). Approximately so. This is all based on a misunderstanding or mis-quoting. Back in the early 1970s Albert Mehrabian published work on the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages but focussing on communication of feelings and attitudes,  i.e. whether the listener liked or disliked the person who was communicating. When the verbal and non-verbal information were incongruent, the non-verbal was most likely to guide the listeners judgement of the person talking.
Some refs:

• Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages. Wadsworth, Belmont, California.
• Mehrabian, A. (1981). Silent messages: Implicit communication of emotions and attitudes (2nd ed.). Wadsworth, Belmont, California.
• Mehrabian, A. (1972). Nonverbal communication. Aldine-Atherton, Chicago, Illinois.

There's a great summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian#Misinterpretation_of_Mehrabian.27s_rule

So the numbers are not so useful! But what is important is the fact that we DO trust body-language more than words. I don't listen to what you say, I watch what you do. And signalling different things with words and body is at least going to stress listeners (I've read that this is the commonest cause of stress in communication or work situations. Maybe). Don't stand in front of an audience shaking in your boots and say "It's really great to be here today".

The Main Message is Mainly Missing

How often do you spend time before planning a presentation to really think through why you are going to talk. What is your purpose, what is your goal? Do you have one :) ? Even if you're a student or your boss just told you to talk about something, you still have the purpose of showing that you know what you're talking about, or are generally competent... don´t you?

What many text books call your "Main Message", is only one item, not fifteen. Easily stated in one short sentence. It should shine through on every slide you show and every topic you take up. You don't have to literally say what it is. A good example is companies presenting for investors where they must show they are competent and trustworthy. But if it's not mentioned directly, then it should be the subliminal message throughout the presentation. It takes a bit of work, and it stops you from starting your slide production immediately, but it's always worth thinking seriously about, if only to figure out what you can leave out or include when time is short. This is the essence, or the main theme that holds your presentation together. So sit down a moment and ask yourself: Why am I giving this talk?, What do I want to achieve? What's my point exactly? What's the bottom line? If the audience only remember one thing, what should that be? Just keep asking the question WHY? until you get to the bottom of it.

What neuroscience tells us

We think we gesture as a result of an idea, a thought or an impulse. Wrong. The unconscious brain is faster at moving our body than our conscious thoughts. That's why planned gestures don't work. People can sense that they're not genuine. Real ones come at the same time or before a statement. False ones are too slow. The body has the first word and the last. We believe the body language first and foremost, whatever the words (later) say.

Your slide show is not your presentation. YOU are your presentation

'Nuff said.

(you can try explaining this principle to the next person who asks for your Ppt presentation in advance of a conference. But don't blame me if it doesn't work!).

Books and stuff: Cognitive Neuroscience

There are some lessons on how our brains work that have been emerging from neuroscience over the last 10 or more years that are extremely useful for understanding communication. There are easy-to-digest books like Malcom Gladwells "Blink" (intuition, a subject for another day) and many less easy to digest (but OK if you have a scientific background in something relevant. Still gives me headaches tho'). Antonio Damasios book "Looking for Spinoza" I think is one of the more accessible of his books. I'm just working my way through another of them, Descarte's Error, and having a hard time. I read a fair bit of neuroscience at University but focussed on other things after that. Problem is that he's far too good at the English language and his sentences get very long and abstract. Almost poetical, but it doesn't help much. (that's another interesting aspect of communication: blocking out your listeners/readers with complex language).

 "How the mind works" by Stephen Pinker is very well written, as all his work, but quite heavy in parts too. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/index.html
His book "The language instinct" is one of my all time favourites.

One of the very very best though, that's not only focussed on cognition, and that's extremely easy to read is "Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are". By Steven R. Quartz, Terrence J. Sejnowski.

Short reviews of these and more books are on my LinkedIn profile.

Lix and Gunning fog, and what on earth is she talking about?

A natural result of working with very highly educated people, in high-tech areas and in an academic environment such as Uppsala, is that I now spend a whole load of time in simplifying arguments and speeches and presentations. Ironic isn't it? I usually say that when you get beyond the point where your professional pride has taken a real beating from hearing the simple language you're using, then you're just starting to get there. You can almost never simplify your words too much - now there's a statement to chew over.

Consider this: readability, ease of comprehension, and simple digestability of language can be measured in various ways. Swedish can be tested according to a "Läsbarhets index" Lix (http://www.lix.se/) and English by various means. Here are some web sites:

http://simbon.madpage.com/Fog/
http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp
http://www.read-able.com/
http://www.editcentral.com/gwt1/EditCentral.html

Take the Lix index for example: a bureaucratic, academic, complex and generally difficult language style will have a score above 50, childrens books under 25, and normal text or the average novel would be about 30-40.
If you take Obama's speeches, for example the victory speech in Chicago, and test chunks and put in pauses as line breaks, then you get an average around 20-25. Now, if anyone ever needs to reach people, to persuade and convince, then he does. One way to interpret this is to understand that convincing people does not depend on big words! It might help your self-esteem, but it certainly isn't helping anyone else. It's something else that does the work for you, not scientific terms or grammar worthy of a classical novel. Shakespeare didn't use big words. So, what's that something else? Ahhh, that takes a bit longer to describe.

Have fun pasting other people's text into the test sites :) You might suddenly understand why you never really could grasp what that person has been saying.

Sometimes an image needs no words: SJ look and learn

A little thought

Actors spend weeks rehearsing for performances. They practice every single aspect of their communication with the audience because there's a lot at stake when people pay good money for expensive theatre tickets. But CEOS of companies to which investors have pumped in millions, step regularly out in front of share holders, board members or potential new investors and do the "winging it" thing. They're taking a risk. Not all of them can carry it off.

"All the better to see you with...", and more thoughts on openings

I was at a workshop 3 years ago with Lena Endre and learnt some wonderful useful things about stage presence and controlling nerves, and this story was just one of the memorable parts.

Ingmar Bergman was to give a lecture to a large lecture theater full of students. The room was packed to bursting and everyone eagerly awaited his entry. Finally he came in, walked slowly around to the front of the long table that lecturers normally shelter behind, and sat himself up on it with legs dangling. Said not a word. He looked around the whole room slowly and finally, after a long silence, he pointed to a person far back in the right hand corner of the room and asked if they could please move a little to their left as they were not so easy to see from the front. Then he started his lecture.

Can you imagine what it felt like to be in that lecture theater? Think about it a moment. You KNOW that he can see you and that he is aware of you. No-one is invisible or anonymous. Many people experience that they are invisible to the majority of speakers because the speaker shows no signs of seeing them. They can do what they like, sitting in the audience; write SMSs, sleep, look out the window. There are several ways to ensure the audience's attention, but without at least eye contact you won't get anywhere. And not just any kind of eye contact will work. But that's another subject.
So, along with all the other things that will give you the best chance of being listened to, there's one simple thing in this story that is particularly powerful. That is, silence! When you go to the front of the room to start a talk, don't start speaking until you've got to where you're going to stand. Face the audience and count off a few seconds. Wait for silence and attention. Think self confidence and stand there like you expect their full attention, not like you're preparing to run for it any moment! As a speaker, you have an automatic mandate at the very beginning of a talk, a power and control that you can very easily throw away. So use it, at least for a moment or two.